COMPASS is, first and foremost, a commons — a collaborative and a public good. It brings together an interdisciplinary community of outstanding researchers and practitioners whose expertise spans law, the social sciences, technology and AI, the natural sciences, design, architecture, journalism, and civic leadership.

Critically, COMPASS is also not a project of established experts alone. We actively incorporate the perspectives of grassroots organizations, Global South actors, and communities worldwide who are already living with the consequences of these technologies and whose knowledge, values, and experiences are indispensable to any governance framework.

The commons model also reflects a commitment to making the initiative’s outputs genuinely public and freely available. The ideas, analyses, frameworks, and recommendations that COMPASS produces are designed to nourish public debate and inform decision-making across sectors — in government, in civil society, in the private sector, and in communities directly affected by these technologies.

The “M” in COMPASS stands for machines — and the choice of that word is intentional. COMPASS insists on a foundational premise: these are tools built by human beings, and they must advance human and planetary well-being. Technologies are means, not ends in themselves. They are machines — sophisticated, consequential, and powerful, but machines nonetheless — and they should be evaluated, governed, and deployed accordingly.

COMPASS focuses specifically on the technologies of automation: large language models, generative AI, algorithmic decision-making systems, and the broader digital infrastructure through which these tools operate and interact with society. These technologies share a common feature: they increasingly perform tasks — cognitive, creative, communicative, administrative — that were previously the exclusive domain of human beings.

That shift carries enormous implications. For labor markets and livelihoods. For the production and distribution of knowledge. For political discourse and democratic participation. For surveillance, warfare, and the exercise of power. COMPASS engages with these implications seriously and concretely, asking not only what these technologies can do, but what they are already doing, to whom, under what conditions, and with what consequences.

The core contribution of COMPASS lies in the policy domain. Our strength is our capacity to translate complex technical and interdisciplinary insights into actionable guidance: parameters, frameworks, principles, and guardrails that can help channel the potential of automated technologies in directions that are beneficial, equitable, and accountable. This work proceeds at multiple levels — from international legal frameworks and national regulatory design to institutional policies, professional standards, and community-level governance.

Finally, COMPASS is concerned with the impacts of these technologies on societies across the world. The effects of AI and digital automation are not only legal or economic. They are also cultural, psychological, ecological and sociological. They are reshaping how individuals experience time, attention, creativity, and relationships. They are transforming how communities understand themselves and how societies produce and contest meaning.

COMPASS asks how automated technologies influence everyday perception and experience, and how those experiences can be enriched rather than diminished. And it attends to ecological dimensions: the environmental costs of large-scale digital infrastructure and to the ways in which AI governance intersects with broader commitments to planetary health.